The Song Poet: A Memoir of My Father

This section brings the text full circle, returning to Laos, and integrating Bee’s varied character throughout the text. The reader has come to know Bee as a young man in Laos and Bee as a middle-aged immigrant in the United States. Here, the reader gets a glimpse of these two selves coming together, providing a new portrait of Bee, not just as an American citizen, although that plays a role, but as becoming the wise father he had always wanted for himself and inhabiting his mother’s role as the strong backbone of the family.

Despite Bee’s fears of being in inadequate father, the way his children come together for him proves he must have done something right. Furthermore, his children still need him. Bee’s pleasure in being able to translate for Dawb when they are in Cambodia is evidence of this, as is his stepping in when Dawb is trying to argue with the authorities at the airport in Laos. Bee, like his mother before him, knows exactly when it is time to back off and get his family to safety.

The incident lends credence to what Kalia references here, the “Hmong men and women from America who had gone missing in Laos” (242). As Bee had claimed before, in the immediate aftermath of the war, many Hmong men in Laos disappeared, their rotting bodies often discovered in the jungle weeks or months later. However, the reprisals against Hmong continued, and two Hmong men from Minnesota disappeared after visiting Laos in 1999, and another in 2006. The treatment Bee receives upon his arrival in Laos indicates that tensions remain high, even after all this time.

After arriving back in Cambodia, Bee and Chue agree to climb Mount Phu Chi Fa, where they will able to see Laos. However, both Bee and Chue find the climb difficult. They support each other on the climb: sometimes Bee pulled Chue along, and sometimes she acted as “a brace on the uneven ground” (253). Once they reach the summit, they do “not let go of each other” even though, Bee realizes, “[i]t had been a long time since [they] had held hands” (254).

Neither Bee nor Chue find what they are looking for on top of the mountain. Bee cannot see where his father was buried; Chue cannot see her family. However, the journey symbolizes their relationship, and Bee seems to realize that there was never meant to be a summit from which they would be able to see their heart’s desire, or even to see clearly. The only thing is the journey itself, and the ways they have supported each other on that journey. Much like their marriage, sometimes the climb was difficult and sometimes it was easy, but the important thing was that they remained together.

After they return from Cambodia, things for Bee are both the same and different. His life and the lives of his family do not change much, but Bee is different, symbolized by his refusal to be mistreated at work. Bee notes that neither he nor his friends “expected to be treated like the white men [they] worked with” (258), only that they can do their jobs safely. It is the bare minimum an employee can ask for. Bee’s insistence on the importance of his safety indicates that, for almost the first time, he values himself as a person as much as he values his children or his parents. Bee finally seems to realize that by not standing up for himself, he had unwittingly taught his children, especially his sons, that they weren’t worthy of fair treatment. Bee is able to do this finally as the respected elder of his family, having now taken his mother’s place after her death.

Nevertheless, much like Bee and Chue’s journey up the mountain, there is no clear resolution for Bee. He does not get his job back, and in fact, he and Chue must sell their house and move to a smaller place. However, Bee does have Chue, and Bee does have his family. Kalia leaves the reader with the image of Bee caring for his Hmong chickens as his youngest son and his grandchildren play around him. Moreover, “[i]nside the house, Chue is home with Dawb and Kalia and their baby girls […] and their husbands […]. Shell, Hlub, and Taylor, are away at college” (268).

Bee tells his children that “[w]hen one dreams in the right direction, the dream never dies, one never wakes, it always only grows bigger and bigger” (268). Bee means here his children’s dreams, but Kalia realizes that her father’s dreams have also grown “bigger and bigger” as the father he never had, and the patriarch of a family that has stayed together and loved each other against seemingly insurmountable odds. This dream is not perhaps what he once had for himself, but it is more than his own father could ever have imagined. Bee has built something new: a family both Hmong and American, that at once changes the culture in which they live and respects the traditions that have come before.